Slowing the snail

Snail mail just got slower. The New York Times reports that the U.S. Postal Service is closing 252 processing centers and laying off 28,000 employees. Its one day service is all but finished. It seems that our steadfast postal peoples' version of speedy was not quick enough to compete.

Sad news for those of us who love the taste of envelope glue.

Postcards from hell, 2011

Typically you get postcards from warm sunny places with palm trees, coconut drinks and umbrellas. The cards are signs of affection and an easy way for your faraway friends to show off. Very rarely do you get a postcard from the armpits of this world. Too much is brewing there; who has the time or inclination to write? And if they did, how would they fit all they had witnessed and felt on the back of a 3x5 card?

A recent Foreign Policy photo series by Elizabeth Dickerson Postcards from Hell, 2011 takes a stab at this. The combination of striking pictures with short narratives make the series seem postcard-like in an ironic way. Worth a glance, since it is unlikely you are going to find these in a mailbox near you.

Shrinking

Friends, in the magazine The Week I recently read our dear post office is operating in the red and things aren't looking up. They're down $3.8 billion this year so far. Overall mail volume is declining and has been for three years. Now if you are like me, you get a lot of junk mail and you may begin to feel this big, bulky government system is just pushing around lots of worthless ads. You might even start to feel that we don't need the U.S. Postal serices.

But as you can tell, on this blog we are fans of the post office, postal system, and most postal workers! BIG FANS in fact. They have helped us to stay in touch for years. (In fact I believe Jessica and I once pondered which country's Post Office was shipping our letters between Japan and Samoa. Who was paying for them we wondered? But in the end we were just glad Air Mail existed as it allowed us to continue our communication.) So I'd like to encourage people to see the good in this service.

In the very informative article I read, a Post Office rep is quoted as saying, what would help is to "urge the public to mail a letter to a loved one and do it weekly." That's exactly what I'm doing-- people send some mail! I'll do you one better- take your Christmas and other Holiday gifts there to ship rather than the other guys. Stay tuned for this weeks coming blog post, it will help spring you to action on behalf of our shrinking postal services.